301–310 of 316 posts
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Well, for one, the EU has (understandably) choosen very anti-Brexit negotiators, hinting at hard and unfruitful negotiations. I guess the UK would have loved if the EU sent Faragne...
Do you mean the current UK government did not put anti-EU negotiators in charge of handling this issue?
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Begging the question: What exactly does "ceasing to be a member of the European Union" mean? What I mean is, there was a whole sales pitch during the campaign about what it might mean (e.g. more money for the NHS) which we all found out subsequently to be tosh. Now we have: "Free trade but not free travel" or something to that effect. Never was such detail ever discussed prior to the referendum.
Downvoted clearly because somebody thinks I misused btq. Read again parent poster clearly assumes the premise .
Hoisting a comment of mine from a previous thread: The UK has never been through a "year zero" forcible reconstitution, so its constitutional and administrative arrangements are full of little adhoc anomalies (the various islands like Sark and Man, the City, "County" Durham, chancel repair liability, and so on). Mostly these are a fine and picturesque addition to the texture of the nation. There's certainly no real a…
Ugh.
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> I really wish they'd stop calling it a "clear majority". I'm not sure when 52-48 was ever such. It's a majority though. If they wanted to have a higher threshold for the vote (say 60%) they should have done as much when writing the referendum.
My take on this is that it was a "qualified" majority to "Leave" but no specific plan was outlined as to what "Leave" entailed. "Remain" is easy: Status quo. "Leave" means many different things to many people. In a constitutional republic (such as Ireland for instance) a referendum clearly specifies the change to the constitution down to the wording and an open informed debate is had on what the consequences, and pos…
But the question on the ballot was "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?" and the option "Leave the European Union" won. It is clear that that means invoking Article 50 and begin exit negotiations with the rest of the EU.
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That's just how democracies work Not really, no. Especially if it's not clear there's an option to say "idk". Say you care very much but don't know what's best? Does your vote not matter, now? If so, doesn't that make the election wrong? But how do you express that? There may be an answer to this deep inside some legislature chapter XVI section 16 paragraph b, but if people don't know, does that matter? Anyway, not s…
> Say you care very much but don't know what's best? Does your vote not matter, now? Yes, your vote doesn't matter in that case, because you have no information to convey to the system: you have no preference. Only votes which are conveying a preference about how the situation should be handled are useful. There's no reason to distinguish between "I care, but don't have anything to say about the topic" and "I don't c…
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The referendum to enter the EU had a 64% turnout with 67.23% voting yes & 32.77% voting no. So that's around 43% that voted to enter[1]. Regardless, I think this entire line of reasoning makes no sense. You could dismiss pretty much any election by multiplying the "yes" votes with voter turnout to get less than 50%. That's just how democracies work, if you don't care enough to vote you don't get a say, that doesn't m…
> You could dismiss pretty much any election by multiplying the "yes" votes with voter turnout to get less than 50%. Not in Australia. Here we have compulsory voting, and referendums have to have a double majority in order to pass (so there's no question about whether the majority of the people actually wanted the change). So multiplying by voter turnout would not meaningfully change the results (voter turnout is >95…
Couldn't you just do the exact same thing with "valid votes" and say the same thing that the parent has said?
[0] - http://www.techly.com.au/2016/06/30/australia-votes-whats-do...
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The referendum to enter the EU had a 64% turnout with 67.23% voting yes & 32.77% voting no. So that's around 43% that voted to enter[1]. Regardless, I think this entire line of reasoning makes no sense. You could dismiss pretty much any election by multiplying the "yes" votes with voter turnout to get less than 50%. That's just how democracies work, if you don't care enough to vote you don't get a say, that doesn't m…
That's just how democracies work Not really, no. Especially if it's not clear there's an option to say "idk". Say you care very much but don't know what's best? Does your vote not matter, now? If so, doesn't that make the election wrong? But how do you express that? There may be an answer to this deep inside some legislature chapter XVI section 16 paragraph b, but if people don't know, does that matter? Anyway, not s…
There is: you don't go to vote.
My father was born in Birmingham, a city in which people of english-descent will be a minority by 2020. When a city is only 40% english-descent, it is no longer an English city.
Karachi is still a pakistani city. Lagos is still a nigerian city. Birmingham is not an english city.
Most brexiters aren't particularly fussed with the finer points of the common market, or EU centralised decision making. They just want border control and feel completely powerless as things stand to change anything. There is no neat referendum question regarding immigration, and there seems to be no way other than a referendum for real democratic hearing of people's views on this issue.
The common working class person has no real ability to alter the globalisation and pro-immigration agenda pushed by mainstream politicians. Successive governments have indicated that they would reduce immigration but all it has done is increase. My father was born in Birmingham, a city in which people of english-descent will be a minority by 2020. When a city is only 40% english-descent, it is no longer an English ci…
That, and it's a bit cheeky to pray-in-aid Karachi as some kind of purely Pakistani city given how much influence we Brits have had over the place as a result of conquering it.
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> You could dismiss pretty much any election by multiplying the "yes" votes with voter turnout to get less than 50%. Not in Australia. Here we have compulsory voting, and referendums have to have a double majority in order to pass (so there's no question about whether the majority of the people actually wanted the change). So multiplying by voter turnout would not meaningfully change the results (voter turnout is >95…
Aren't Australians encouraged to not write "fuck you" and things on the ballots as people sarcastically participate? [0] Couldn't you just do the exact same thing with "valid votes" and say the same thing that the parent has said? [0] - http://www.techly.com.au/2016/06/30/australia-votes-whats-do...
Yes, donkey voting is a problem as well. But there's a stigma around it as well (as that article shows). Invalid voting on the other hand doesn't have a stigma around it.
> Couldn't you just do the exact same thing with "valid votes" and say the same thing that the parent has said?
Maybe. But if someone makes the decision to tick random boxes rather than write "fuck you" then it's clear that they've made a decision to make a vote. It's a grey area, and I despise the issue of donkey voting, but you can't deny that the person has "had their say".
However, the number of invalid votes is counted though. And even considering invalid votes, the percentage of valid votes is better than most countries which don't have mandatory voting. Not to mention that invalid voting is known to be a method of abstaining from voting. I don't know what the stats are for donkey voting, but I doubt that a large enough portion of people do it for it to classify as that large of an issue.